A blog dedicated to the rational discussion of politics and current events.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

If you REALLY Honor Dads...

My heart goes out to all of the parents who six months ago were coping with the loss the day before of their children. In their honor and in the honor of all the other parents in this country who lost a child to avoidable gun violence, I am posting this photo advocating for better gun regulation.

Gun control works. Where there is good, enforced gun control, there is LESS gun violence, less loss, less death, less injury, less intimidation with firearms.

Those states and cities with stronger gun control have lower rates of gun violence. Those countries with strong and enforced gun control have far far lower rates of gun violence. Every study done, although studies were unfunded through political action by the NRA, showed gun control, gun regulation, gun limitation, reduced rates of gun violence.

So, why are you skeptical that gun control is a pathway to peace, if you define peace as a reduction in gun violence?

Further, the gun control we have now has been gutted by the NRA - the NRA has made it easy for those who have been adjudicated as dangerously mentally ill (both to themselves and others) to get guns legally by putting in place a method for lower level courts to return their gun rights without a mental health review of any kind. Those who get those rights to guns returned, after losing them, go on to commit many many crimes of gun violence. The NRA has made it easier for those who have committed violent crimes to get THEIR gun rights returned; they too go on to commit far higher levels of gun violence afterwards than those who are not criminals.The NRA gutted the prohibition against drug addicts getting guns legally, by restricting the time that they can be listed as prohibited persons in the NICS data base to one year, even if that period of time is far shorter than their drug conviction sentences. This results in more drug addicted, drug impaired people getting guns who should not have them, and then committing acts of gun violence. And of course the NRA made cooperation with the NICS data base voluntary, in federal legislation, and then made sure that a majority of states - more than 30 of them - either do not fund or participate in it at all, or do so in such small numbers that it is useless.

And of course we have seen how much worse things are with the lifting of the assault weapon and expanded capacity magazine ban.

Gun control WORKS, lax gun control kills and maims people because of what it permits people to do with guns through allowing too many of the wrong people to own increasingly more dangerous firearms.

Turning up the heat on right wing lies

Opinions

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

― Isaac Asimov, "A Cult of Ignorance," Newsweek (Jan. 1980)

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past wisdom

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An astute observation from Bertrand Russell

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